As apocryphal car stories go, this one is a beauty.

A guy rings his insurance company with a repair claim that involves both rear doors being ripped off his family car. How did it happen?

Simple. There was the usual mad morning rush to pack the kids in the car and get them off to school. Dad selects reverse and starts backing out of garage. One of the kids, who has possibly dined on baked beans for breakfast, treats his siblings to the nasty side effects.

His brother and sister, desperate for fresh air, fling open the back doors of the reversing car at just the wrong moment and there you have it, one very expensive vehicle repair.

Yes, children can be tough on cars. And yes, applying the child locks on to the inside of the back doors is a good safety measure to ensure your offspring stay roughly where you intended.

The bad news is that unless the damage they do is significantly high, it might not be covered in your insurance policy or it might not be worth claiming if the excess exceeds the actual cost of repairs.

Examples? Cleaning a spilled milkshake from your Mercedes-Benz’s carpet, or Texta scribble from your Jaguar’s leather upholstery is unlikely to be covered by your insurance policy, many of which have exclusions for general wear and tear.

Of course, it never hurts to check with your insurer, but even a successful claim has to be weighed against the size of the claim’s excess.

There are many other factors to do with family motoring that need to be considered when it comes to how they affect vehicle insurance.

heft is a problem for any vehicle owner, not just for the stuff that might be taken from a car but the damage caused by a break-in.

The best policy is to make a car less tempting to opportunistic thieves by removing anything stealable, but that’s difficult if your car is a repository for toys, prams, baby seats and even electronic devices such as DVD players, whether portable or fixed.

So if you’re shopping for insurance, check what is covered and what isn’t, and if your car is safely garaged overnight make sure your insurance policy reflects this with a lower premium.

Baby seats and toddler seats shouldn’t be ignored. Apart from the possibility of theft, they may need to be replaced if the car is in an accident and there’s the possibility they won’t continue to function as intended.

Again, check with your insurer about whether they have a “no questions asked” policy to child-seat replacement.

Then there’s the fact that children grow up and want to drive the family car either as learners or P-platers. Separate insurance policies can be obtained to cover learners, but they might not be necessary.

Comprehensive insurance policies that specifically cover learner drivers who are children of the policy holder are fairly common so always check exactly what (or if anything) is covered when a learner is at the wheel, and whether higher excesses are applicable in the case of damage.

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